July 28, 2017

A carefully planned, neatly executed military operation

The timeline’s a blur of shrieks and stabs and stone-throws, so let’s try to put things in order: Three Palestinian terrorists murder two Israeli police officers. Israel responds by placing metal detectors at the entrance to the compound. The Palestinians portray the simple security measure as a Jewish attempt to wrestle the holy spot away from Islam. Violence ensues, claiming the lives of three Israelis slaughtered in their kitchen as they were celebrating the birth of a baby. A Jordanian teenager attempts to stab an Israeli security officer in a diplomatic residence in Amman and is shot and killed. The Jordanian government, violating international accords, holds the officer hostage, demanding he be interrogated by the local police. The Palestinians demand the metal detectors be removed. Other Arab nations agree. Benjamin Netanyahu caves in, taking the detectors down and promising they’ll be replaced with other high-tech surveillance systems.

If you’ve ever played chess competitively, or participated in combat, or engaged in any other activity in which victory hinged on strategic calculus, you’ll have no problem seeing this scenario for what it truly was: a carefully planned, neatly executed military operation. Even in a neighborhood as chaotic as the Middle East, coincidence alone cannot explain a series of occurrences that lead a powerful regional player, Israel, to fold and hand its mortal enemies a stinging victory. So what happened to make Israel retreat?...

After you discount a host of other regional bystanders—like Jordan, where another weak regime depends on Israeli security cooperation for its very survival—you’re left with one conclusion, backed by no discernible evidence but eminently logical and hard to refute: The architect of the recent wave of violence is Iran....

Rather than merely force Israel into a tactical defeat, which Hamas, say, or even Hezbollah has tried to accomplish repeatedly, Iran has always made clear that its conflict with Israel was theological in nature. When you heard imams anywhere from Jerusalem to Riverside, California, thunder this week and last about the Jews defying Allah’s will and desecrating his holiest sites, you were quite likely listening to the viral rhetoric of Iranian mullahs....

How was this operation executed? How did Iranian cash and intel find its way to Umm al-Fahm and Jerusalem and beyond? That’s a question for Israel’s capable intelligence services. But Netanyahu, a supremely gifted political operative, didn’t need to stick around and wait for an answer. He understood two things: first, that he was witnessing a finely orchestrated play unfurling at his doorstep; and second, that if he hit back hard, Donald Trump wouldn’t be there to back him up. And so he played the only card available to him—backing down and thanking both Trump and the Jordanians for their part in de-escalating the conflict, which is all the proof you need that neither the Jordanians nor Trump had any real role to play. National security isn’t an Academy Awards acceptance speech; you don’t publicly thank the people who helped you, only those you need to make sure don’t screw you over in the future.

Whoever was behind this recent gambit would likely try again soon. And next time, it’s not so clear that political know-how will save us from the brink of disaster.